It's just a jump to the left...

It’s morning again, like a bucket of cold water unceremoniously thrown on me by impatient hikers eager to get going, but not because it’s cold but because it’s sudden, and harsh—a scream in the dark. Dad is home again, and mom is getting ready to go to work. Both tired, both sick of the life this new life has brought and I, half-thief who took with mine the meaning off theirs, simmer in the guilt under a quilt made by a third-grader and taken to Goodwill to save her soul. This is the worst time of the day, when both are home and when both have just enough energy to fight and memories long like the anchor’s chain, and just as heavy. They are weary travelers, I tell myself, in a quest they did not choose and whose virtue left them long ago. Your children’s lives are only precious when they’re threatened.

San Jose is a cold place—even in the heat of the summer. Ten times more people were murdered within ten miles of our apartment than I kissed the year we lived there. Refuge though it might have been from the unwelcoming, newly-Republican world of the “me generation”, that apartment was more a cave where I could hide in darkness even from its other occupants, all related to me by sheer force of happenstance and not a one whom, at the time, I might have chosen for my own. I sought escape. In the end, the sissy in me wanted a hug, but the man who would one day emerge from the ashes could not accept the weakness of such needs and twisted my emotions to my loins. Lacking any normal output for such energies, I hid behind—what did I hide behind? I cannot remember. By forgetting every day, the new one seemed less hopeless.

Days upon days of the same: accusations, recriminations, arguments, fights, long escapes that lead only to further accusations. The bus was full of strangers, but they were quiet, and they smiled, and when I pretended I didn’t know where I was going, they pretended they hadn’t told me just a few days before which one was my stop. And there was that strange place on the way: a museum? a temple? a sanctuary for the remnants of the old Egyptian empire now hiding in San Jose, perhaps. Who knew to what gods such creatures prayed? Who knew what strange hungers afflicted them that could be satisfied in such a quiet neighborhood? And then, at last, The School. That was the end of the line.

My parents always thought me smart, articulate, educated beyond what might be genetically anticipated. What they failed to see was that it was perfectly understandable when seen in the light of life at home. Screams cannot be heard 20,000 leagues under the sea. Who can notice one extra bottle breaking against a wall in the War of the Worlds? No pain I felt could match the sense of loss one must feel witnessing the end of the world from the relative safety of The Time Machine. Lost in books, I was the Invisible Man. Until I was my own.

When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich. Even if I was only fourteen.

But that is another story.